Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

Herb's plan, as he unfolded it, was for me to rewrite the Henry and Fern book to smooth out the tone, softening the sex to make it no more salacious than an ordinary Harlequin Romance, and he would release it in their regular publishing line. He would give it a month in the bookshops and then release another version, keeping the same story but with wall to wall smut, or as he described it, an orgasm on every page, over their pornography label. This one would carry the legend "AUTHOR'S UNCUT EDITION" in big letters across the cover that would otherwise look like the original. This was my chance to put in quivering clits, gnarly mushroom headed cocks, G spots, nipples, beads and dildoes and vibrators and cock rings, and all the three-hole friendliness that I could squeeze in. What made it especially interesting was that he was offering to pay Suzy to be an associate editor on this project, reporting to Grace, and no chapters were to be submitted to Grace until Suzy had approved them for pornography content.

Then Herb got going on his marketing plan. While our rewriting was going on, he would bribe some church leaders, rabbis, and imams to denounce the book as soon as it was released, and threaten to burn all the copies they could get their hands on. He thought that maybe the Catholic Legion of Decency would accept a donation to ban it if he handled the transaction through his friend the Archbishop. Maybe, just maybe, he could stage a massive interfaith book burning in Boston, with all sorts of religious leaders making speeches and demonstrators denouncing pornography clashing with demonstrators defending the first amendment, in an angry conflict just short of a riot, with wall to wall police in riot gear and TV news crews. He'd schedule all this so it fell between holidays, when news was slow, and predicted that my face would be seen on the tube more often than the President's.

This was it! My big chance to emerge from the crowded ranks of Successful Novelists, into the rarefied company of Great Men of Letters! Will Shakespeare, stand down. After four centuries, your relief has arrived!

Chapter nineteen

Suzy and I didn't even wait to get home to start celebrating. I had checked us out of the hotel room and left our bags at the bell captain's station. I phoned and asked for the bags to be taken back up to the same room, and extended our stay for two more nights. Next stop was a liquor store, where I picked up a big bottle of Lynchburg, Tennessee's finest product, two magnums of good champagne, and an assortment of beef jerky. As we came out I spotted a flower shop across the street, so I got us a flower arrangement to jazz up our hotel room love nest. In the flower shop I used their phone book to locate the Victoria's Secret store, where I bought Suzy a really slinky net outfit, like one I'd seen in a magazine. It was elasticized just enough so that laid on a flat surface it shrank together and looked like a stick, but the body of a beautiful woman would stretch it out to fit around her shoulders, breasts, and hips, with no slack anywhere. The lines of the net emphasized and flattered the lines of the woman, and the net effect, pardon the obvious pun, was to produce total euphoric bliss in any admiring male. I didn't just buy it, I insisted that Suzy model it for me. It's a wonder that I didn't make a gooey mess of my underwear and slacks, right there in the fitting room. The last stop on our shopping tour was WalMart, where I bought a medium size cooler, four bags of ice cubes, a small wastebasket, and some big bottles of club soda to go with the bottle of Jack.

I used the valet parking at our hotel, and let the valet unload our purchases onto a bellman's dolly to be hauled to our hotel room. I called room service to order two extra large shrimp cocktails, and got to work icing down one magnum of champagne in the wastebasket with a towel wrapped around it, and the other one, along with the club soda, in the cooler. Meanwhile Suzy had watered the flower arrangement and put it on the coffee table, where it added just the festive touch I was looking for.

"Okay, Suzy, into the fishnet. Amaze me." Talk about obedience! She came out of the bathroom wearing that little creation and I couldn't even talk. Talk, hell, I could hardly breathe! She looked like a million bucks, back when that was a lot of money. And she knew it. Oh, how she strutted and posed!

Just then there was a knock on the door and the room service waiter came in with his little cart carrying our shrimp cocktails. It happened just as Suzy was striking a pose like a model at the end of the runway, where she has to stop and turn around slowly, giving the whole room a look at her outfit. As I held the door open, the waiter carefully guided his cart into the room, concentrating to make sure he didn't run it into the walls or furniture. The he slowed down to position it where we could get at the food, and as he looked up there was Suzy slowly revolving, dead ahead of him. He made a funny noise in his throat and stood up straight, forgetting all about the cart, which kept going straight ahead. Suzy squealed and jumped onto the bed to get out of the way. The cart crashed into a chair. The waiter put his hand over his heart, slowly slumped down into a sitting position on the floor, and toppled over onto his left side, out like a light.

Suzy jumped down and knelt by the fallen waiter, feeling for a pulse at his neck. I flipped the security lock to keep the door from closing all the way, and ran for the phone on the desk to call for medics. Then I called the bell captain and told him to get a newspaper photographer up to the room to get the picture of the century for tomorrow's front page. While we waited for help to arrive I grabbed my laptop and dashed off a half page publicity story about the waiter being stricken and receiving first aid from Susan Birdsong Brewster, a Native American of the Chickahominy tribe, who is traveling with noted novelist Jack Andrews as a technical consultant and associate editor from Eagles' Nest Publishing Company. Together they are doing the final edit of Mr. Andrews' latest action/suspense/romance novel, destined to do for twenty-first century American letters what Gone With The Wind did for the twentieth. Pleased that I had laid some tempting bait to lead buyers into bookstores, I proofread the blurb and burned a disk of it, just as the cavalry came charging in.

The photographer arrived first, took two steps into the room and snapped three quick shots, then went on to the bathroom doorway, from where he could cover the waiter, Suzy, me, an ambulance crew with all their gee-whiz hardware and a fold-up Gurney, a hotel detective, the bell captain, and the hotel's general manager. The photographer didn't miss a beat. Every time somebody new walked in the door he got a flash in his face, and as he stood there blinking till his eyesight came back, the action was stopped long enough for the photographer to get a carefully composed second shot of him and all the rest of the turmoil that was gradually filling up the room. I'm not sure when, but amid the cast of thousands a reporter showed up. He stayed by the entrance door, noting names of everybody, and trying to get a revealing interview of Suzy to go with the many revealing photographs of her in the revealing fishnet that his friend the photographer had snapped. I'm sure that he was a dedicated professional, and wouldn't be asking her all those questions just to get a close look at her body. I handed the reporter the disk with the press release on it, and retreated to the desk to email a copy to Herb at the publishing house. Finally, as I wondered if our crowd included every occupation practiced in downtown Boston, in came a burly policeman to complete the tableau. "All right, now, what's going on here?" he asked. The general manager greeted the policeman, and I was quick to step over to hand the GM two glasses of straight whiskey with a few ice cubes. He and the cop quickly retreated to the hallway for an in-depth discussion, and I never again saw either one of them again, or the glasses of booze either.

An hour after the waiter's dramatic entrance, the crowd was gone and I had locked the door. The room was a little messy, but we were alone at last. Miraculously, our shrimp cocktails were still cold and untouched. I uncorked the bottle of champagne from the ice-filled wastebasket, and Suzy and I toasted the day's events. Between bites of shrimp, Suzy gasped, "Did all that really happen? That wasn't a hallucination, was it?"

"Oh, it happened, all right. You'll know it when we get the photos. I slipped the photographer some pictures of dead presidents to send a full set to us, and another to Herb. He must have snapped way more than fifty, maybe a hundred. The reporter told me that his newspaper owns a television station, and you'll probably make their evening news today and the morning news tomorrow, with selected photos. They'll airbrush out your snatch and nipples, but other than that you'll be there in all your beauteous glory, fishnet and all. Who knows where it'll go from there. Maybe you'll get discovered for the movies. Or TV. Or porn flicks."

I stopped and thought about all that we had witnessed, and realized what was missing. "Damn. All those people and nobody said, 'Stand back and give him air!' If only I'd thought of it in time I could have said it myself. The chance of a lifetime to shout a ridiculous cliche, wasted. It would be something to tell my grandchildren about."

"You mean our grandchildren, don't you?"

"You bet I do. Maybe we ought to get started on that project. Future generations don't just happen. Generations need to be generated. And watching you in that fishnet all this time has me primed to start generating right now. Lie down so I can plug in the generator." And we got right to work on it. It's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it.

Chapter twenty

Back in Providence, we got into the rewrite hot and heavy. Establishing a consistent tone that stopped short of obscenity was a revealing exercise, because some of the original chapters had been written when I was depressed or bored, and others in periods of great excitement. So I was pleased to see that by smoothing it out we were improving the quality of the story. What a joy it was to have Suzy there to bounce ideas off, instead of having to do it all by myself.

Even when Carol was with me, I'd been lonely. We were two solitary people occupying the same space. Why couldn't I see that at the time? This was completely different, far better in every way. I'm embarrassed: here I am, a professional writer, and I can't properly describe what a difference Suzy's loving presence made in my life. I don't have the right words to capture the just-right feeling of having an empty gap in my soul finally filled. This must be how a solitary sock feels when its lost mate turns up in the bottom of the laundry basket. Some things are just meant to exist in pairs. Hey, how's that for a romantic metaphor? Eat your heart out, Nora Roberts!

Suzy's research turned up an interesting reference to her ancestor Hempstead in a book about battlefield medicine. It seemed that right after the Civil War he donated a small fortune in gold to finance the treatment of wounded veterans, both Union and Confederate, at a hospital in southern Maryland, where procedures were developed that increased the survival rate and reduced the need for amputations. The hospital bore his name, and was well known locally until it burned to the ground in 1902. So at last we knew what happened to Hempstead's gold. It seemed a shame to waste all of Suzy's scholarly research, so she got right to work on a biography of her ancestor. I was afraid it might be painful for her to turn her back on the prospects of finding millions of dollars, but by then the gold had lost its gleam for her and she took it in stride. All that I felt was relief at not having to grub around in a world of mud, mosquitoes, and moccasins, so we just shrugged it off with "It is what it is."

After the Author's Uncut Edition hit the bookshops, packaged for sale in plain brown wrapping paper, we kicked back and took a break before the book signing tour. The second thing we did was pay a visit to Suzy's family in Virginia. The first was a candlelit supper in a classy restaurant, where between the entree and dessert I got down on one knee and asked her The Question, with a jewelry box open in my hand, a diamond sparkling like a beacon, and a photographer sent by the publisher to record the moment for my readers all over the world. Try to act surprised: she said yes!

There's not much more to tell. The Brewster family accepted me with open arms, although some had reservations about the uncertain career of an author, as compared to the security of steady employment

at an honest trade, like butcher or mechanic or welder. I greeted the comely squaws of the family at arms length with a friendly smile and sincere handshake, so I wouldn't have to be burned at the stake. We promised to come back in a year for our wedding, and after many handshakes, hugs, and waves, we rode off into the sunset.

A Parting Thought

It's always interesting to talk with high school kids, particularly juniors and seniors, when they're getting serious about what they'd like to do for a living. One problem they face is that they're filled with ideas that have been planted by their high school teachers, and the teaching ranks are filled with people with good intentions but zero worldly experience. If some young fellow should mention a desire to become a novelist, he'll probably go raving on about subjective verbs and split infinitives and irony and foreshadowing. When he pauses to take a breath, you might pass on some good advice he'd never get in an English class, like the importance of physical conditioning. Strength and endurance are needed to put up with the rigors of the profession, along with strong kidneys, a healthy liver, a powerful prostate, and an open mind. He may look at you as if you're mentally unhinged, but all it'll take is one late night visit from a half crazed young Indian maiden, and he'll bless you forever.

This author game is not for the weak or faint of heart, but the rewards can be truly amazing. It's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it!